JIM GUY: We are experiencing a plastic tsunami

Cape Breton Post

Published: Apr 06 at 5:53 p.m.

Jim Guy – Political Insights - SaltWire Network

Now the most common human-made substance found on the planet

Each week without much thought we fill thousands of plastic blue bags containing plastic items for Cape Breton Regional Municipality Waste Management to collect and add to the mountains of garbage we produce.

So begins the scourge of plastic.

Invented just 112 years ago, plastic is now the most common human-made substance found on the planet. We make more plastic than any other synthetic product. We use more plastic than any other product and we discard more plastic than any other product.

The annual production of plastic worldwide is now in the hundreds of millions of tons and, shockingly, it threatens our local environment. Some scientists believe there is more plastics in the ocean, our rivers and lakes than there are fish.

The strong demand for plastic comes directly from us. We insist on packaging our food with it. It is also widely used in many hardware, electronic and medical products. We simply take plastic for granted and believe it should be used for almost everything in our lives.

But many plastic products are used by us for only just a few minutes (coffee cup covers, straws, stir sticks, etc.) and then discarded. There they remain in the environment for centuries if not recycled.

Our clothes and textiles contain millions of plastic microfibres that shed into the environment on land and in water. Prince Charles noted the ubiquitous nature of plastic in our food and drinking water when he said that "plastic is on the menu."

Microplastics have infiltrated our food chain because they are regularly ingested by the animals and fish we eat. According to the journal “Science” the global mass production of plastics began in the 1950s. There is convincing evidence we are ingesting the plastics we threw away in the 1950s.

Not surprisingly, plastic pollution has become a major international issue. It is included on the agendas of some major international environmental organizations. Reduce, reuse and recycle is now the clarion call in many countries including Canada. In fact, reducing plastic waste will be on the agenda at the G7 leaders' summit this June in Charlevoix, Que.

Canadians are among the most wasteful consumers on the planet, disposing of 25 million tons of waste annually. This includes 13 million tons of plastic products and microplastics that end up in our landfills and dumping sites.

in Cape Breton our plastic joins the waste over decades of garbage that kill thousands of coastal seabirds, marine mammals and local wildlife.

Canada's 6,000 municipalities have another challenge as China recently informed the rest of the world that it will no longer take garbage to process from other countries. This leaves Canada's towns and cities with an abundance of unwanted plastic materials that will now have to be recycled and destroyed. Hugh quantities of plastics that were removed from local government jurisdictions and sent to China are now back within Canadian jurisdiction, amounting to a costly plastic overload for municipal governments to deal with.

So what can we do as an island of consumers who engage in waste management? There are hundreds of dumping sites in Cape Breton, most of which contain plastic products. On the positive side Nova Scotia takes plastic beverage bottle deposits. There are hundreds of recycling depots that return a small deposit on plastic bottles and on beer, wine and hard liquor bottles.

The federal government could play a more active role by imposing a tax on plastic bottles and give the funds to municipalities for their waste abatement programs. Ottawa could also require major multi-national corporations, such as Coca-Cola, Nestle, Pepsi and McDonald's to increase the recycled material they use in their products and packaging to 100 per cent.

In a similar category, Tim Horton's operates with plastic packaging on some of its products, many of which end up on our streets, in our dumps and unrecycled litter. They create yet another market: high recycled content products create their own market demand for recycled materials. They encourage designing collection systems for reusable plastics that could also be included in our deposit-return programs. Start-ups spread and jobs are created.

Cape Breton is surrounded by ocean waters vulnerable to the invasion of plastics experienced around the rest of the world. Dumping and litter are the primary sources of plastic invasion in our waters. The strictest enforcement of provincial and municipal laws would go a long way in reversing the trends we already know are there. But they are only effective deterrents if violators are apprehended, charged and fined.

Professor Jim Guy, PH.D, author and Cape Breton University professor emeritus of political science can be reached for comment at jim_guy@cbu.ca